Remember those happy childhood memories of playing on the beach, building wondrous sand castles and digging deep holes? Why not recreate some of those glorious moments by using sand to create an epic animation! This art project is a great tactile experience that improves your drawing and animation abilities, explores creating textures, value and use of positive and negative space.
Materials
- Sand
- Lightbox
- Optional tools such as wooden skewers
- Optional video camera and tripod
Steps
- Place your light box onto a surface you can easily reach.
- Place about 4-5 handfuls of sand onto your light box. The amount of sand you use will depend on the size of your light box so adjust accordingly.
- Turn your light box on.
- Use your fingers, hands and tools like wooden skewers to draw whimsical images in your sand. See below for some great sand animation tips.
- Once you feel comfortable with your images and have practiced long enough why not find some cool music to go with your sand animation and record the whole thing with a video camera?! You now have created your very own sand animation!
Tips and Techniques for Creating Sand Animations
Add Variety by Using Tools
Be creative with how you use your hands. Explore working with your fingers as well as your entire hand. Don’t forget to try using different tools like wooden skewers.
Moving Sand in Different Directions Changes the Appearance
Moving sand in one direction as opposed to another will produce a different look. Think about how you want to move the sand.
Create Light and Dark Areas by Using Various Quantities of Sand
Play around with different quantities of sand. A large amount of sand makes some areas very dark, whereas little to no sand makes other patches very light. You can also have a combination of light an others very light and still others a mixture between light and dark.
Three Options To Changing a Scene
There are essentially 3 ways of “erasing” a scene or image: adding sand, taking away sand, and transforming the sand. When changing scenes, try transforming a previous image into another image instead of erasing your image.
Practice Makes Perfect
Sand animation is a sort of dance with your hands that needs to be carefully coordinated. The more you practice your scenes the faster and better they will become.
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